By way of example, a method is described in the patent application US 2004/0101089 A1, the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated herein by reference.
When examining lung tissue, it is sometimes medically necessary to also evaluate the circulatory state of thin blood vessels. Due to partial volume effects, this evaluation is difficult using reconstructed CT images which display HU values, especially in the case of fine lung vessels. The HU values in the interior of the vessel calculated in the process depend inter alia on the vessel diameter, the reconstruction kernel and, if applicable, also on the slice thickness of the reconstructed slice images.
If the vessels are very thin, partial volume effects prevent a clear display of vessels supplied with contrast agent. In this case, these partial volume effects have effective diameters which can be significantly larger than the pixel diameter or voxel diameter of a CT image.